🔗 Share this article

This individual has long been known as a larger than life character. Clever and unemotional – and never one to refuse to an extra drink. During family gatherings, he’s the one discussing the latest scandal to befall a regional politician, or regaling us with tales of the outrageous philandering of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday during the last four decades.

Frequently, we would share the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, prior to heading off to our own plans. However, one holiday season, roughly a decade past, when he was scheduled to meet family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, with a glass of whisky in hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and advised against air travel. Consequently, he ended up back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky.

The Morning Rolled On

Time passed, yet the anecdotes weren’t flowing in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but he didn’t look it. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.

Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, my mother and I made the choice to get him to the hospital.

We considered summoning an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?

A Rapid Decline

By the time we got there, his state had progressed from peaky to barely responsive. Fellow patients assisted us guide him to a ward, where the distinctive odor of hospital food and wind permeated the space.

Different though, was the spirit. People were making brave attempts at holiday cheer all around, even with the pervasive sterile and miserable mood; tinsel hung from drip stands and portions of holiday pudding went cold on tables next to the beds.

Upbeat nursing staff, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were moving busily and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

Heading Home for Leftovers

When visiting hours were over, we returned home to chilled holiday sides and Christmas telly. We saw a lighthearted program on television, likely a mystery drama, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

The hour was already advanced, and snow was falling, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?

The Aftermath and the Story

While our friend did get better in time, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and later developed a serious circulatory condition. And, while that Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

How factual that statement is, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition has done no damage to my pride. And, as our friend always says: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.